"Full and complete; there will be no hitch to-night," cried Alfonso, banging the table.
A stranger happening to take rail at Colon on this day would have been utterly astounded had he been informed that there was to be a commotion that very evening. For the trip along the whole length of the Panama Railway would have shown him armies of men and officials engaged methodically with their work. The busy scene of smoking steam diggers, of rock drills, and hustling spoil trains would have resolved itself finally, when his eye was at last accustomed to the vastness of it all, into a scene of order and method, into a gigantic undertaking which occupied the wits and strength of all whom he saw. He would at last have appreciated the fact that those vast works at Gatun, and between it and Limon Bay, had a direct connection with that enormous cutting which occupied the time of such an army of delvers at Culebra, though twenty odd miles separated the two, and that throughout the length of the Panama zone, stretching from north to south of the isthmus, the work undertaken by any one man had some special relation to that appointed to another. Moreover, that, in spite of distances, in spite of the fact that the undertaking seemed to be progressing piecemeal at widely separated intervals, yet each and every part was a portion of the whole, a necessary portion, where the work in hand was conducted with a hustle and method truly American, and with a swing which augured for success. But of commotion there was not a sign. That traveller could not possibly have guessed that the evening had a disaster in store for the people who worked beneath his eye.
It was precisely half-past five on this special evening when a terrible explosion shook every one of the wooden buildings at Ancon, and caused the verandas at Gorgona to shake as if they would tumble. A vast flame seemed to leap into the air, there came a thunderous report, that went echoing down the Chagres valley, and then dust and debris obscured the sky in the direction of Pedro Miguel. The serene face of this portion of the zone, lit a second or so before by a wonderful moon, was obscured as if by the work of a volcano.
Instantly men poured out from the Commission hotels, and stood in the street of Ancon and the nearest settlement, asking what had happened.